On Tue, Oct 23, 2018 at 7:14 AM Mark Green via cctalk <cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote:
> I worked on the early Smalltalk systems, mainly variations of Smalltalk > 76. They were there. It was the motivation for my MSc thesis which explored > concurrent message passing for UI implementation including a demo of a > system based on the desktop metaphor. > I've never seen evidence for any Smalltalk having a desktop metaphor (as in the discussion at hand -- icons and folders representing files and/or data, not merely windows, etc.). It's certainly possible that the platform was used for experimentation with such within PARC or elsewhere, but no smalltalk images I've seen contain anything like that. Is your thesis available to read anywhere? I wrote an Alto emulator (https://github.com/livingcomputermuseum/ContrAlto) that you can use to run a variety of Smalltalk versions (-72, -74, -76, and early renditions of -80 are available on Bitsavers) if you wish to revisit this. - Josh
